Eclipse 4diac 3.0 Enters Feature Freeze!

After more than two years of development and over 7200 commits across 4diac IDE and 4diac FORTE, Eclipse 4diac 3.0 has the feature freeze phase! This marks a major milestone toward our next big release.

Over this period, we’ve seen more than 5800 commits in 4diac IDE and 1400 commits in 4diac FORTE — a tremendous community effort to modernize, optimize, and extend the capabilities of Eclipse 4diac.

With the feature freeze in place, our focus now shifts to stabilization and polishing to ensure a solid and reliable 3.0 release, planned for about three weeks from now.

Highlights of Eclipse 4diac 3.0

This release brings a wealth of new functionality, improved usability, and major internal modernization across all core components.

— 4diac IDE

Refactoring functions in graphical and textual editors
Validation of IEC 61499 projects, including support for loading and repairing incomplete projects
Completely reworked and largely improved the IEC 61131-3 Structured Text editors
Interpreter for IEC 61131-3 Structured Text allowing testing and debugging of FBs directly in 4diac IDE
Support for named constants
A new library and package system
Added IEC 61131-3 functions and VAR_IN_OUT support
Simplified deployment and monitoring, with the ability to store deployment and monitoring configurations

— 4diac FORTE

Modernized code base and build system
Greatly reduced overhead in event processing and data connection handling

— 4diac FBE

New component in 4diac 3.0
4diac FBE builds 4diac FORTE fully automatically, no downloads or installs of third-party software needed
Manages multiple 4diac FORTE configurations for multiple target machines and operating systems on a single developer machine
Integration into 4diac IDE upcoming, a beta-quality setup is available

We’d love your help in making this release the best it can be!
Please download the early access builds, test them, and share your feedback.

👉 Get the latest builds and try them out!

If you find issues or have suggestions, please let us know through the corresponding issue tracker:

Your feedback is invaluable in making Eclipse 4diac 3.0 a great release.
A huge thanks to everyone who contributed code, tests, bug reports, and ideas along the way!

Let’s make 4diac 3.0 our most solid and feature-rich release yet!

Cheers,
The Eclipse 4diac Team